Shedding My Skin
Kirstan Morris
Spring 2008
One highly invasive surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Five years of emotional turmoil and infertility
treatments that cost over $15,000. Six artificial insemination failures. Twenty-four plus months of painful
ovulation drugs and shots. Three miscarriages. One tubal pregnancy. Three D & C’s. Nine months of
counseling to keep depression from pregnancy loss at bay. One serious blood condition discovered that
led to 465 abdominal shots of blood thinners. Two C-sections and a freaking partridge in a pear tree.
My marathon of medical procedures and personal heartache on the road to motherhood reads like a
twisted Stephen King version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” So how is it, after all the turmoil I
slogged through to become a mother, I find myself standing here at King Soopers in aisle three, a
screaming son writhing belligerently in my arms and a daughter who is chucking much-needed
ingredients for tonight’s dinner out of the cart wondering aloud, “I wonder how much I could get for them
on Ebay?”
Yes, Ebay. A simple EUC ad with a well-chosen visual would do it—these little blond cherubs and their
dimples would reel in an unsuspecting buyer no problem. Granted, the 21 month old is currently a rabid
little biter, so that would hurt his resale value, but the four year old can cook as well as I can—that has
got to be worth something. Still, as long as a potential buyer does not witness the dueling Richter-scale
tantrums that have literally shut down aisle three here at King Soopers, I could close the deal. And yes, I
do see the irony. Hell, the irony screams at me much like my four-year-old does some days--in long and
high-pitched, Siren-like wails. I wanted to be a mother at such a visceral level in my soul eight years ago
that I would have ripped my own arm off at the socket and handed it to you if it meant I could reproduce
successfully. Now I have equally visceral moments like this one I’m having here in aisle three, holding a
melting box of frozen corn, where I would rip off that same limb just to have five minutes to remove a
tampon alone, much less travel alone with my husband or eat a meal alone in silence.
There are women out there blinking in freshly-powdered, neatly quaffed, feminine indignation at my raw
confession that I might want to sell off my kids, who wouldn’t dream of stepping into my battered five-year-
old, single-income Nikes for a second. However, those soul sisters who get buried in dirty cereal bowls,
dirty diapers, dirty laundry, and dirty kitchen floors all before 7:30 AM and who have to drag their
haggard selves into the bathroom to eek out a 1.5-minute shower before preschool while their kids use
one another for batting practice know of what I speak. Life in the stay-at-home trenches is much harder
than any outsider realizes regardless of the mom’s education and maternal qualifications. As a result, in
the past four years since I cleared all of my fertility hurdles and blithely sprinted headlong into the wall of
motherhood, I have had a large handful of instances like my recent Ebay musings at the grocery store.
Truthfully, my musings embarrass and frustrate me. The thoughts that flicker through my neurons tell me
to shed the responsibility of my offspring much like a snake sheds its skin, to get away, to flee the
scene. No, I am not talking about violent thoughts by any means—just thoughts of rapid escape,
rejuvenating respite, and thoughts of scraping the sticky mantle of motherhood off myself so that I might
enjoy what it is like to be a free woman once again. It is not as though I want to escape to a free-spirited
life of jaunting through European hostels with a single Italian on my arm or a party-every-night existence
haunting LoDo bars till dawn. My life before babies was not without responsibility or scheduling, but it
was MY life. Me. Remember her? Sometimes I honestly don’t. That woman could go to the bathroom
whenever she wanted, read a book when she wanted, garden for hours when she wanted, and she could
actually lie down on her own couch without being bombarded by flying toys and small bodies and high
pitched voices screaming for things that needed to be done right now.
Nowadays, I live entirely for other people. My life is not my own whatsoever right now, and damn it, I miss
me. That’s why a quick Ebay sale has such allure some days. Heck, even Craigslist would do the job.
Yet, rereading these words of mine--the tired words of a mom drowning in her own children’s needs--
makes my stomach drop like a ragged boulder because I can still hear myself, five years ago, gulping in
gasps of air and sobbing out a fervent and crazed prayer to God while I sped across town to tell my
husband face-to-face that we were going to lose another baby. I couldn’t muster up the courage to call
him—I knew I didn’t have the strength to say the words. A call from the fertility nurses came during my
lunchtime in the teacher’s lounge, dropping the bomb that my blood work was going south in a hurry—
there would be no baby in 32 weeks—again. As I drove erratically down the street, I kept repeating in a
desperate wail, “I want to be a mother! I want a baby! Why not me? Why do I keep losing them? I want
to live my life for more than just myself! I want to be a mom!” I wanted a baby, so I could live my life for
someone else. I was tired of living my life centered on me—I knew in the center of my soul that I needed
something deeper for a purpose in my life. That other me sat in the far corner of her husband’s
business’s parking lot and wailed for almost half an hour before she had the guts to tell him that they
had failed again. There would be no baby. She was alone again.
I remember her, the woman huddled in the parking lot who was destined for yet another D&C--that
woman who was me, beyond desperate to be needed by a child, and now, the same me--a women just
as desperate to be alone. Why can nothing in life be in simple moderation? Talking to another mom
friend of mine yesterday who was struggling to adjust to having a new Golden Retriever puppy in her
house with her two young sons, we commented on the fact that there is an awful lot of “all or nothing” in
life and not a lot of in between. You either have children living in your home and all of the chaos and
tears and joy that they bring, or you don’t. You either have a pet living in your home and all of the
messes and sloppy kisses and inconvenience that it brings, or you don’t. Every adult knows that life is
full of irony, for it’s an age-old lesson that gets beaten into each of us eventually. Somehow, that
knowledge of a global ironic condition does not assuage my angst; it makes me feel a bit trapped in my
own skin. This is my life, and I can’t run away, ever. These little ones are mine forever and ever and
ever. There is nowhere for me to go.
So, where does that leave me as the not-so-frozen box of corn gets kicked out of my hand by my son
and explodes on the laminate floor, prompting a store-wide call for a wet mop clean-up on aisle three? I
know that I do NOT apologize for my Ebay musings at that moment or for my occasional feelings of
motherly desperation, for they are honest and true and just as cathartic in their utterance as all of the
emotional baggage I unloaded during my counseling for depression in the midst of my infertility
marathon. Lessons I learned in counseling to survive being childless have served me quite well in
surviving the daily rigors of being a stay-at-home mom. While losing babies and struggling with all of the
medical procedures we faced, I survived by not attending a single baby shower in two years, not one. I
also buried every Christmas card that was covered in a photograph of a friends’ kids—they went to the
bottom of the pile and stayed there. I did what I had to do to save my sanity and what was left of my
heart.
Similarly, the only way I am going to endure being at home alone with two young kids every day is to find
other women out there who know what my battered Nikes feel like. These women have to be able to
hear my screeches of frustration and then laugh with me as my Sybil-like moment ebbs. Heck, the only
thing that made me laugh that hairy afternoon in King Soopers was the sight of a persnickety gray-
haired woman’s stricken face who overhead my frustrated mutterings about selling my kids. What a look
of sheer horror and undisguised loathing! She careened past me while probably speed dialing Child
Services, thinking I had lost my mind. Maybe she never had children, but a safer bet is that the chaotic
childrearing chapter of her life has long since been blocked out, buried in her heart to keep safely till
death. And I’ll bet that snippy woman is dangling her feet off the other side of life’s ironic pendulum in
long moments of unwanted silence nowadays and wondering why she feels so trapped in her own skin. I
hear you, sister.
Kirstan Morris is a stay-at-home mom with almost a decade of teaching junior high school English in her
repertoire, prior to having her daughter and her son. Writing essays and nurturing dreams of having her
own business sewing for kids light the occasional moments in her days when the walls close in on her.
Kirstan Morris
Spring 2008
One highly invasive surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Five years of emotional turmoil and infertility
treatments that cost over $15,000. Six artificial insemination failures. Twenty-four plus months of painful
ovulation drugs and shots. Three miscarriages. One tubal pregnancy. Three D & C’s. Nine months of
counseling to keep depression from pregnancy loss at bay. One serious blood condition discovered that
led to 465 abdominal shots of blood thinners. Two C-sections and a freaking partridge in a pear tree.
My marathon of medical procedures and personal heartache on the road to motherhood reads like a
twisted Stephen King version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” So how is it, after all the turmoil I
slogged through to become a mother, I find myself standing here at King Soopers in aisle three, a
screaming son writhing belligerently in my arms and a daughter who is chucking much-needed
ingredients for tonight’s dinner out of the cart wondering aloud, “I wonder how much I could get for them
on Ebay?”
Yes, Ebay. A simple EUC ad with a well-chosen visual would do it—these little blond cherubs and their
dimples would reel in an unsuspecting buyer no problem. Granted, the 21 month old is currently a rabid
little biter, so that would hurt his resale value, but the four year old can cook as well as I can—that has
got to be worth something. Still, as long as a potential buyer does not witness the dueling Richter-scale
tantrums that have literally shut down aisle three here at King Soopers, I could close the deal. And yes, I
do see the irony. Hell, the irony screams at me much like my four-year-old does some days--in long and
high-pitched, Siren-like wails. I wanted to be a mother at such a visceral level in my soul eight years ago
that I would have ripped my own arm off at the socket and handed it to you if it meant I could reproduce
successfully. Now I have equally visceral moments like this one I’m having here in aisle three, holding a
melting box of frozen corn, where I would rip off that same limb just to have five minutes to remove a
tampon alone, much less travel alone with my husband or eat a meal alone in silence.
There are women out there blinking in freshly-powdered, neatly quaffed, feminine indignation at my raw
confession that I might want to sell off my kids, who wouldn’t dream of stepping into my battered five-year-
old, single-income Nikes for a second. However, those soul sisters who get buried in dirty cereal bowls,
dirty diapers, dirty laundry, and dirty kitchen floors all before 7:30 AM and who have to drag their
haggard selves into the bathroom to eek out a 1.5-minute shower before preschool while their kids use
one another for batting practice know of what I speak. Life in the stay-at-home trenches is much harder
than any outsider realizes regardless of the mom’s education and maternal qualifications. As a result, in
the past four years since I cleared all of my fertility hurdles and blithely sprinted headlong into the wall of
motherhood, I have had a large handful of instances like my recent Ebay musings at the grocery store.
Truthfully, my musings embarrass and frustrate me. The thoughts that flicker through my neurons tell me
to shed the responsibility of my offspring much like a snake sheds its skin, to get away, to flee the
scene. No, I am not talking about violent thoughts by any means—just thoughts of rapid escape,
rejuvenating respite, and thoughts of scraping the sticky mantle of motherhood off myself so that I might
enjoy what it is like to be a free woman once again. It is not as though I want to escape to a free-spirited
life of jaunting through European hostels with a single Italian on my arm or a party-every-night existence
haunting LoDo bars till dawn. My life before babies was not without responsibility or scheduling, but it
was MY life. Me. Remember her? Sometimes I honestly don’t. That woman could go to the bathroom
whenever she wanted, read a book when she wanted, garden for hours when she wanted, and she could
actually lie down on her own couch without being bombarded by flying toys and small bodies and high
pitched voices screaming for things that needed to be done right now.
Nowadays, I live entirely for other people. My life is not my own whatsoever right now, and damn it, I miss
me. That’s why a quick Ebay sale has such allure some days. Heck, even Craigslist would do the job.
Yet, rereading these words of mine--the tired words of a mom drowning in her own children’s needs--
makes my stomach drop like a ragged boulder because I can still hear myself, five years ago, gulping in
gasps of air and sobbing out a fervent and crazed prayer to God while I sped across town to tell my
husband face-to-face that we were going to lose another baby. I couldn’t muster up the courage to call
him—I knew I didn’t have the strength to say the words. A call from the fertility nurses came during my
lunchtime in the teacher’s lounge, dropping the bomb that my blood work was going south in a hurry—
there would be no baby in 32 weeks—again. As I drove erratically down the street, I kept repeating in a
desperate wail, “I want to be a mother! I want a baby! Why not me? Why do I keep losing them? I want
to live my life for more than just myself! I want to be a mom!” I wanted a baby, so I could live my life for
someone else. I was tired of living my life centered on me—I knew in the center of my soul that I needed
something deeper for a purpose in my life. That other me sat in the far corner of her husband’s
business’s parking lot and wailed for almost half an hour before she had the guts to tell him that they
had failed again. There would be no baby. She was alone again.
I remember her, the woman huddled in the parking lot who was destined for yet another D&C--that
woman who was me, beyond desperate to be needed by a child, and now, the same me--a women just
as desperate to be alone. Why can nothing in life be in simple moderation? Talking to another mom
friend of mine yesterday who was struggling to adjust to having a new Golden Retriever puppy in her
house with her two young sons, we commented on the fact that there is an awful lot of “all or nothing” in
life and not a lot of in between. You either have children living in your home and all of the chaos and
tears and joy that they bring, or you don’t. You either have a pet living in your home and all of the
messes and sloppy kisses and inconvenience that it brings, or you don’t. Every adult knows that life is
full of irony, for it’s an age-old lesson that gets beaten into each of us eventually. Somehow, that
knowledge of a global ironic condition does not assuage my angst; it makes me feel a bit trapped in my
own skin. This is my life, and I can’t run away, ever. These little ones are mine forever and ever and
ever. There is nowhere for me to go.
So, where does that leave me as the not-so-frozen box of corn gets kicked out of my hand by my son
and explodes on the laminate floor, prompting a store-wide call for a wet mop clean-up on aisle three? I
know that I do NOT apologize for my Ebay musings at that moment or for my occasional feelings of
motherly desperation, for they are honest and true and just as cathartic in their utterance as all of the
emotional baggage I unloaded during my counseling for depression in the midst of my infertility
marathon. Lessons I learned in counseling to survive being childless have served me quite well in
surviving the daily rigors of being a stay-at-home mom. While losing babies and struggling with all of the
medical procedures we faced, I survived by not attending a single baby shower in two years, not one. I
also buried every Christmas card that was covered in a photograph of a friends’ kids—they went to the
bottom of the pile and stayed there. I did what I had to do to save my sanity and what was left of my
heart.
Similarly, the only way I am going to endure being at home alone with two young kids every day is to find
other women out there who know what my battered Nikes feel like. These women have to be able to
hear my screeches of frustration and then laugh with me as my Sybil-like moment ebbs. Heck, the only
thing that made me laugh that hairy afternoon in King Soopers was the sight of a persnickety gray-
haired woman’s stricken face who overhead my frustrated mutterings about selling my kids. What a look
of sheer horror and undisguised loathing! She careened past me while probably speed dialing Child
Services, thinking I had lost my mind. Maybe she never had children, but a safer bet is that the chaotic
childrearing chapter of her life has long since been blocked out, buried in her heart to keep safely till
death. And I’ll bet that snippy woman is dangling her feet off the other side of life’s ironic pendulum in
long moments of unwanted silence nowadays and wondering why she feels so trapped in her own skin. I
hear you, sister.
Kirstan Morris is a stay-at-home mom with almost a decade of teaching junior high school English in her
repertoire, prior to having her daughter and her son. Writing essays and nurturing dreams of having her
own business sewing for kids light the occasional moments in her days when the walls close in on her.
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